Balthus' Camera

Originally Posted Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Illness is now combined with physical ailments.  From sitting and lying about so much, my sciatica has returned.  To stand is agony.  To cough while standing is something beyond that.  I am decrepit and withdrawn.  And now add something else.  Yesterday I ran across a story about Balthus' Polaroids.  There was a showing in New York at the Gagosian Gallery (link).  The gallery made a YouTube video of the installation (link).  Vanity Fair had an article about it (link).  And somehow I missed it all.  Why? Why didn't anybody tell me?  There is a two volume book published of the photographs that I am trying (so far unsuccessfully) to get (link).  I have a few leads, but they are dubious at best.  Somebody out there help me!  Balthus is probably the most controversial artist of the 20th Century.  Germany banned the exhibit, a sort of national pride, I'd guess, as moral exemplars of the Western World.  Paintings are one thing.  Polaroids are another.  Balthus entered into a treacherous realm when he picked up a camera.  A camera is a dangerous thing.  It has been since its invention.  It has been called the devil's machine.  It takes sweet family vacation pictures and Kodak moments, and then, in a seductive, hypnotic instant. . . it turns provocative.  And there is no changing the Polaroid.  You can't manipulate the image afterwards without being obvious.  A Polaroid just is.  Or was.  Damn them for taking away such a beautiful tool.  Perhaps they were stricken, however, by a powerful moral conscience.   

In any case, I need your help.  If you can hook me up with a book, let me know.  I will give you a print of the Balthus-inspired image above.  Estimated worth--five-hundred dollars.  Trust me, it's true. 

This morning, I was inspired by this (link).  For a number of reasons.  Nella Larsen (Swedish?) was a model, actress, and author who partied with the artistic elite of the 1920s.  I can't say more without reading the book, but my imagination is already running wild which is where I love for it to run.  And I need that now here in the middle of my miseries.  I am home from the factory one more day.  I will be off the couch and beginning to move, starting my recovery.  I will shower for the first time in three days.  I will sit outside and get some sunlight.  And I will think of Nella and the twenties, that magical era that only the fifties, the other decade after The War, begins to approach in any way at all. 

So I go to recover health remembering Dylan's prophetic line, "You can always come back/ But you can't come back all the way."